IMEN McDONNELL

All the single farmers

(To the tune of Beyoncé's All The Single Ladies)

Imen McDonnell receives an email from a person looking for a spouse for their brother, who is a farmer.

The email read like this:

Hi there, I'm looking for wife/girlfriend for my brother, who owns a dairy farm in xxxx . He is 38 years old. Can you help?

Regards B.

Now, this is not the first time I've received such an inquiry. Usually the messages come from farmers who are looking for a partner themselves or from women who would love to meet and marry a farmer. I can fully understand why they would email me. After all, I married an Irish farmer and am writing about it, so I suppose it comes with the territory.

But frankly, I never know how to respond and these notes end up in an email folder at the side of my inbox that I've entitled ''Looking for Love''. The truth is, I haven't got a clue as to how to meet a farmer! Before I met Richard, I hadn't stepped foot on a farm in my life - unless you count the obligatory school outing to Zander Maple Sugar Farm in first class where we sampled sugary sap from taps in maple trees. No livestock, no smells, except the glorious maple fragrance that filled the air that morning.

When I met my husband, he was as far from a farm as he could be, on the other side of the Atlantic in a metropolitan American city. He told me straight away that he was farming, but I don't think I fully understood what it meant to be an Irish farmer until after we were married and actually moved out to the farm.

To my mind, I fell in love with a man, not a farmer - in the same way one falls in love with a man and not a teacher or a scientist or a fisherman.

Admittedly, I still don't fully understand the dynamics of Irish farming, which may possibly only be totally comprehended if you were born and raised on a farm in Ireland. But I do know that my husband works long, hard hours and the farm is valued just as much as myself and our little boy. I have realised that if you marry a farmer, you marry a farm too.

I decided to share my matchmaking dilemma on Twitter in the hope of getting some good suggestions from Irish followers. The reactions streamed in for an entire day. Many assumed it was a sister writing in for her brother and felt that she should ''butt out''. There was the question that ''perhaps the brother has an alternative lifestyle'' and didn't want to be married off, which again came with the suggestion of telling the writer to mind their own business.

Then came the debate about why farmers should be very careful about who they take up with for fear of losing land. These comments became more serious and often involved the term ''road frontage'' for reasons why there are so many bachelor farmers. It seems that many farmers remain bachelors for fear of losing their land if it doesn't work out - or sharing it if it does. I, for one, having come from such a different world with no prior experience, find that notion very sad if this is true.

In the end, a great suggestion that I recommend a website called www.muddymatches.co.uk turned up in my Twitter feed. Apparently, Muddy Matches is a reputable matchmaking site for people who live in rural areas in Ireland and the UK. I replied to the email, sharing the site with ''B''. I hope it works out.